As you’d expect, Spielberg’s characterization is lively, with Jamie Bell voicing the intrepid, if almost personality-free boy reporter Tintin (who never actually seems to write anything) and Andy Serkis, aka The Man With No Face, as his alcoholic sidekick Captain Haddock. Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are perfectly cast as the comic-relief duo of Thomson and Thompson, a pair of inept but indistinguishable bowler-hatted detectives. (Sadly, Prof. Cuthbert Calculus, along with his hearing impediment and his ludicrous inventions, do not appear in this chapter.) Some of the numerous action set-pieces are absolutely spectacular, such as a memorable chase through the streets of a Middle Eastern port city (pre-modern Dubai or Bahrain, perhaps) involving a motorcycle, a grenade launcher, a jeep, a rushing canal, a falcon, a tank, a moving hotel and a clothesline.

That scene, mind you, does not appear in any of the three Tintin graphic novels from the 1940s — “The Crab With the Golden Claws,” “The Secret of the Unicorn” and “Red Rackham’s Treasure” — from which screenwriters Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish (along with uncredited collaborators, one suspects) have cobbled together this film’s story. Perhaps understandably, Spielberg has sought to translate the naïve, idealistic and distinctively European colonial-era worldview of Hergé’s hero into a more familiar idiom — pretty much that of Indiana Jones. How well that works for viewers around the world is very much an open question, but it’s certainly no accident that “The Adventures of Tintin” opened more than a month ago in Europe, and is only now reaching American theaters. Hergé’s books are enormous cultural landmarks both on the Continent and in Britain, but have never been more than a marginal, Europhile eccentricity in the United States. If the movie succeeds here, it’ll be in spite of its source material, not because of it.

Charles de Gaulle supposedly once said that Tintin was his only rival for supremacy in the French-speaking world, and the more you know about the history of those two, the funnier that is. There’s considerable debate over how to interpret the Tintin books in social and political terms, but let’s start with the fact that Hergé began as an illustrator for Belgian Boy Scout manuals and a right-wing Catholic magazine, and those origins are clearly encoded in the fearless boy reporter and his globetrotting adventures. If Hergé wasn’t quite a Nazi collaborator during the occupation of Belgium, he certainly wasn’t a resister either. All three of the books incorporated into Spielberg’s film were deliberately apolitical works originally published in a pro-German newspaper. Early Tintin books contain both grotesque racist stereotypes and disturbing anti-Semitic caricatures, which Hergé later disavowed and/or redrew. In the original version of “Tintin in the Congo,” we see our hero at the blackboard, delivering a lecture to a class of benighted natives: “My dear friends, today I’m going to talk to you about your country: Belgium!” (I’ve never read Hergé’s overtly propagandistic “Tintin in the Land of the Soviets,” in which the boy reporter discovers Lenin and Trotsky’s secret cave of stolen treasure, but that one turned out to be ahead of its time.)

What point am I making about Spielberg’s movie? I don’t know, maybe none, except that I think the original Tintin adventures, in all their Hardy Boys Go to Fascist Europe sinister innocence, strongly resist contemporary translation. For good or ill, they remain defiantly themselves. Furthermore, as impressive as the Spielberg-Jackson motion-capture technology is, it’s only a vague approximation of the blinding color palette and richly detailed cartoon panels of Hergé, who pioneered the graphic novel before the term was invented and became a major influence on Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. (Warhol said he thought Hergé was as important as Walt Disney.)

“The Adventures of Tintin” takes us from an unnamed European capital — it isn’t quite Brussels and isn’t quite London — to rip-roaring shootouts on the high seas and a small-plane crash in the sands of the Arabian peninsula, as Tintin and Captain Haddock strive to beat a sinister collector named Sakharine (voiced by Daniel Craig) to a treasure hidden by Haddock’s 17th-century ancestor after his defeat of the legendary pirate Red Rackham. Taken on its own terms, the movie offers plenty of excitement — but the thing is, I’m not quite sure about those terms. Serkis gives a terrific performance, but do we really need a disturbing, quasi-naturalistic portrait of Haddock as a sweaty, red-faced loser battling a lifelong addiction? (In the books, his drinking is strictly played for laughs, “Thin Man” style, and I recognize that you can’t and shouldn’t get away with that today.)

I’m a lifelong fan of Hergé’s work (within certain obvious limits) and I’ve now seen the movie twice, the second time in the company of a seven-year-old who’s inherited my Tintin collection. We found it alternately thrilling, baffling and eventually exhausting; it’s as if Spielberg gets frustrated with his inability to capture Tintin’s true spirit, or worried that viewers are getting bored. He keeps ramping up the violence, speed and pace of the action sequences, which are plenty of fun at first but conclude with a chaotic dockland duel between Haddock and Sakharine, using giant cranes, which my son found terrifying and incomprehensible. (Again, it’s an invention not found in Hergé.) I recognize that “The Adventures of Tintin” is a labor of love, a work by two important filmmakers in tribute to a unique and peculiar artist. That doesn’t mean it was worth doing, in the end, or that it rises above the level of intriguing technical curiosity.

Last night’s episode was solid and surprising, but arriving eight episodes into the series’ run, it’s meager compensation for viewer loyalty. Lang’s character, Commander Taylor — the first explorer to step through the time rift that let inhabitants of a polluted Earth to colonize an unspoiled, alternate, prehistoric version of their planet — finally confirmed what viewers suspected and hoped: that he’s not such a great guy after all. (Of course he isn’t! Why cast the frequently chilling Lang in an unambiguous nice-guy role?) We learned that, like so many colonies throughout real Earth history, Terra Nova is founded on a lie and a crime. That it’s a well-meaning lie and a desperate crime doesn’t mitigate the feeling that Taylor is one dark hombre, and that the Terra Novans’ enemies, a splinter group known as The Sixers, are less an evil force than principled opposition. (I love how they communicate with a spy within the Terra Nova camp via a big dragonfly outfitted with a data chip; here and elsewhere, the series displays a knack for showing you things you’ve never seen before, anywhere.)

It seems that a few years after Taylor stepped through the portal, a legendary general who’s now listed as “disappeared” showed up aiming to relieve Taylor of his command. The general told Taylor that a team of scientists headed by Taylor’s brilliant son Lucas were trying to make the time portal work both ways — an innovation that would allow the inhabitants of polluted Earth strip Terra Nova-Earth of its resources. The general drew his gun, but Taylor drew faster and killed him and buried his body then wrote his son Lucas off as a traitor and banished him to wander the prehistoric jungle. Said jungle is currently festooned with chalk-scrawled scientific blueprints of the two-way time tunnel that Lucas’ dad prevented him from finishing.

This twist echoed concerns that I raised in my review of the pilot episode: “Isn’t the Terra Nova project a futuristic version of the American myth of Manifest Destiny, which prizes settlers’ desires over the integrity of a ‘new’ land and its indigenous inhabitants? According to Spielberg and company, it is morally wrong for humans to treat one version of Earth as a toilet, but OK to slip through a time-space rift, insert themselves into the other Earth’s Cretaceous period, and alter whatever evolutionary process would have occurred if they’d never built cute little cottages there?” Last night’s installment, “Vs.,” suggested that “Terra Nova” is going to address some version of those questions. Taylor’s bloody back story implied that the title colony isn’t a 22nd-century Jamestown — which, if you know history, would have been problematic anyway — but a beachhead in what was supposed to be the most spectacular rape of natural resources in all of human history. The general’s bosses essentially said, “We have shortsightedly destroyed our own planet, now let’s try to save it by pillaging an alternate version.” Taylor is standing in the way of that scheme. But his murderous stubbornness is hard to defend if you recall images from the pilot that showed a denuded, toxic Earth inhabited by people who couldn’t even leave their homes without donning respirator masks. The character has unilaterally declared himself the patriarch of a new civilization — a guy who’s going to do it all over again and do it right, keeping the forces of imperialistic capitalism at bay however he can. Meanwhile, the Terra Nova settlers’ loved ones back home are stuck in putrid trash-heap where oranges are considered rare delicacies.

There are no easy answers to this conundrum, and I like that. Good science fiction should leave you with no safe place to stand as you watch the characters navigate their world. The last few episodes of “Terra Nova” have been somewhat darker than the first five, and much less morally clear-cut and comfortable. One episode exposed a legendary and beloved founding explorer-scientist as a research-faking liar, and gave us reasons to sympathize with the former assistant who murdered and impersonated him. Another episode got the the main family’s eldest son, Josh (Landon Liboiron), involved in a scheme to steal drugs from Terra Nova and sell them to the renegade Sixers in exchange for importing his girlfriend from dying Old Earth to Terra Nova-Earth. If, indeed, “Terra Nova” is evolving, and becoming a bit less like the original, brain-dead “Battlestar Galactica” and more like the SyFy Channel remake, that’s great news for viewers. It’s also great news for Lang, whose skill at playing tortured men of conscience, screwed-up visionaries and oddly enjoyable monsters makes him the ideal anchor for such a show.

But even if this recent change in tone sticks, I doubt it’ll amount to more than a dash of pepper in otherwise bland stew. With its mostly placid and untroubled nuclear family, “Brady Bunch”-level relationship dialogue, and improbably clean sets and costumes (which say “Hawaiian resort” more than “prehistoric colony”), “Terra Nova” feels as if it was time-warped in from a network schedule circa 1985 or so, when people still sat down in front of their TVs at the same time each night and watched whatever happened to be on.

The very worst episodes of “Lost” were more compelling than the best that “Terra Nova” has shown us to date, and their melancholy undertow, puzzle-box construction and dedication to mystery always gave viewers a lot more to chew on. Supposedly the show isn’t going to do more than 13 episodes this season, and those are already in the can. If it does get renewed, maybe series creators Kelly Marcel and Craig Silverstein can light a fire under their writing staff and turn “Terra Nova” into the thought-provoking adventure it should have been in the first place. While they’re at it, maybe they can give us an extended flashback to Taylor’s Terra Nova origin story and show us how he survived alone in the jungle for months, fending off ravenous prehistoric creatures until reinforcements arrived. That tale, which we first heard in the pilot, is more thrilling to imagine than “Terra Nova” is to watch.

He talked about how much he missed his friend and collaborator, indie-film pioneer John Cassavetes, who had recently died. But when I asked Falk whether he’d rather be remembered for his performances in Cassavetes’ “Husbands” or “A Woman Under the Influence” than as the professionally befuddled Lt. Columbo of TV fame, he gave me a tolerant smile. I’ve long since lost any transcript of this interview, but as I recall it now, he said that Columbo had been very good to him, and he was very grateful. If the public wanted him to play that guy for the rest of his life, he was fine with it.

Falk, who died on Thursday at age 83 in Beverly Hills, Calif., after apparently suffering from dementia for several years, didn’t literally play Columbo for the rest of his life, but pretty darn close. (The last “Columbo” movie aired in 2003.) Appearing as the rumpled detective in 69 inverted-structure TV episodes and movies over a 35-year period — the “Columbo” formula has been described as a “howcatchem” rather than a whodunit — the sandpaper-voiced, one-eyed New York native permanently imprinted himself on pop-culture history and thoroughly overshadowed the rest of his career. You can argue that that’s too bad, if you must, but mostly it’s amazing. Falk’s TV role as a deceptively disheveled L.A. cop lasted much longer than Heath Ledger’s or Kurt Cobain’s (or Mozart’s) lives.

It’s certainly true that Columbo wasn’t Falk’s most emotionally challenging or dramatically audacious role, but like most actors of his generation he was delighted to keep working, and had no illusions that he could control the quality of the finished product. This was a guy who spent years during the middle of his career playing bit parts in now-forgotten TV series — “87th Precinct,” “Wagon Train,” “The Dick Powell Theatre” — and only gradually worked his way back into movies. Getting cast in the first Columbo TV movie (“Prescription: Murder” in 1968) when he was already over 40 was a huge break, and one Falk apparently never forgot.

Before his Columbo comeback, in fact, Falk’s career as a star appeared to be over. He had tasted sudden success in his early 20s, getting cast from a Manhattan cattle call for the role of coldblooded killer Abe Reles in the 1960 film “Murder, Inc.,” and then garnering an unexpected Oscar nomination. New York Times critic Bosley Crowther described Falk in the film as “moving as if weary, looking at people out of the corners of his eyes and talking as if he had borrowed Marlon Brando’s chewing gum.” Falk was nominated for best supporting actor again the next year for his role in Frank Capra’s final film, “Pocketful of Miracles.” But that movie was a flop, and while Falk went on to win five Emmys he had trouble getting film roles, and would never get near an Oscar again.

When “Columbo” became a regular television series in 1971, its first episode was directed by a 25-year-old unknown named Steven Spielberg, whom Falk identified immediately as a remarkable talent. He told a Spielberg biographer two decades years later, “This guy [was] too good for ‘Columbo’ … Steven was shooting me with a long lens from across the street. That wasn’t common 20 years ago. The comfort level it gave me as an actor, besides its great look artistically — well, it told you that this wasn’t any ordinary director.”

By that time, Falk was already working in two worlds at the same time, playing a television detective on the West Coast while working with the New York-based Cassavetes on wrenching roles in the semi-improvised works “Husbands” and “A Woman Under the Influence.” Those films sharply divided critics at the time (neither Pauline Kael nor Roger Ebert could stand “Husbands”), and still don’t have anything like a popular following, but are widely viewed in critical and academic circles as seminal works of American independent cinema. But while Falk and Cassavetes remained friendly — and the latter even guest-starred on a “Columbo” episode — their collaboration seemed to burn out after those two movies, and most of Falk’s later films were more conventional Hollywood material.

Other than his iconic near-cameo in “Wings of Desire” and the narrator role in “Princess Bride,” in fact, Falk’s post-Cassavetes and non-Columbo career wasn’t especially memorable. He starred in Elaine May’s “Mikey and Nicky,” which is something of a cult comedy classic, and was completely hilarious as an unhinged ex-CIA agent in Arthur Hiller’s “The In-Laws.” But whether or not his movies are any good (and a lot of them aren’t), you never get the feeling Falk is coasting on his gruff and growly manner. Take a total throwaway like 2005′s “The Thing About My Folks,” where he was almost the only thing that made it watchable. (Do not, however, watch Falk in “Three Days to Vegas” from 2007; it’s not fair to remember him that way.) Like Lt. Columbo, Falk was a consummate professional, responsive to every moment. He could turn a scene to comedy or tragedy (or both) while apparently doing nothing. We are poorer without the man, of course, but in another sense he’ll be with us a long time: Turning to leave, then hesitating and turning back to ask one more question, a mischievous certainty in his eye.

Here’s a clip of Falk from “Wings of Desire,” for your viewing pleasure.